


cordial light

by besselfcn



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Manipulation, Mentioned Abigail/Arthur, Mentioned Arthur/Dutch, Unrequited Crush, Women helping Women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27231760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: She is sixteen and he must be twice that. Pinched brows and a sun-drenched face; an open and honest look in his eye that don’t match the carnage laid out at his hand. She touches her tongue to the fine droplets of wet blood that coat her lips and cheek; it tastes of earth and salt, like the faraway memory of sea spray.
Relationships: Mary-Beth Gaskill/Arthur Morgan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31





	cordial light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nukawinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nukawinter/gifts).



> A really fun commission for Karo!! Sighs dreamily about The Girls. 
> 
> See end notes for further elaboration on tags.

She is sixteen and brilliant, sixteen and bright, sixteen and stupid. She is sixteen and there is twenty-two dollars in cash shoved into her dress sleeves and a fistfull of pocket watches and chains besides; sixteen and a hand catches her by the skirts and says _gotcha, you little harlot_ , with the glint of a knife with gold inlay above her and she thinks _I could get at least six dollars for that_ as it arcs down towards her throat. 

The air around her explodes in noise and red mist. 

It takes her a moment to realize the weight pressing down on her body is _his_ body, limp and headless, and she scrambles out from under him even as the blood soaks through her dress. Another series of gunshots and she sees them — three men on horseback, one with his arm raised and gun trained upon where the men used to be and now is only bodies. 

They slow up next to her; the tallest of them is already off his horse, searching the bodies’ empty pockets. 

“Y’alright?” asks the man with the gun.

She is sixteen and he must be twice that. Pinched brows and a sun-drenched face; an open and honest look in his eye that don’t match the carnage laid out at his hand. She touches her tongue to the fine droplets of wet blood that coat her lips and cheek; it tastes of earth and salt, like the faraway memory of sea spray. 

“Fine, now,” she manages. 

“What’d you do to anger them fellers like that?” he muses. 

She looks down at her sleeves, soaked in blood. She withdraws from them a crips twenty dollar bill. 

He stares open-mouthed for a moment — then he laughs and laughs, a hearty sound that warms her from the toes upward. 

“Dutch, you’ll wanna meet this girl,” the man says. “What’s your name, then?”

She thinks about lying. She looks at him again. “Mary-Beth,” she tells him. 

“Arthur Morgan,” he says. It sounds just right. 

—

When they ask how old she is, she says eighteen — last thing her momma taught her before she got turned out all on her own. _Anyone asks you how old you are_ , she’d said, _you tell ‘em you’re eighteen years old. They respect a grown woman more’n they’ll respect a child, alright?_

She finds after a few weeks with the Van der Linde gang that respect doesn’t much seem to be based on age at all. Nor does it seem based on how long it is anyone’s particularly been there — Bill seems to have been around a long time, the way they tell it, and she hasn’t caught anyone respecting him quite yet. Abigail ain’t been long at all and has a baby fresh on her breast besides, and all the girls seem to look up on her. 

Respect, Mary-Beth learns quickly, is centered around Dutch. It orbits around him like the earth orbits ‘round the sun.

Nobody is caught up in that spiral tighter than Arthur Morgan.

She watches the pair of them with her arms elbow-deep in washwater; with a needle in her hand sewing patches over bullet holes. Arthur follows Dutch into gunfire, into schemes and scams, and into the yawning dark of his tent at night. The rest of the camp is polite enough to avert their gaze, and Mary-Beth catches a glare or two when she stares--but she stares, and commits to memory the muffled sounds that drift out over the campfire crackle. 

Sometimes, when she has a spot of privacy, she hikes her skirts up and curls around one of her hidden storybooks and dredges up the memory. She doesn’t know for sure whose noises it is she’s bringing with her, but she imagines big honest eyes and a finger curled round a trigger.

—

“Surprised Arthur don’t have a woman already.”

As soon as she’s said it the blush fills her cheeks; she can feel Karen and Abigail’s eyes on her, one pair harsher than the other. She looks up to meet the angrier eyes first — she knows Abigail is a little sweet on Arthur, the way she asks him for help with Jack sometimes, the way she says _thank you, Arthur,_ in those soft tones of hers, but she also knows Jack ain’t his. The ice in Abigail’s eyes shocks her still, seizes her heart with the cold of it. 

“He used to,” Karen says, just on the right side of whiskey-drunk. 

“Karen,” Abigail snaps. 

“What?” Karen shrugs. “He did.”

“He don’t anymore?” Mary-Beth asks. 

Something passes between the two older girls — some kind of quiet understanding. In the distance she hears the men approaching on horseback.

“No,” Karen says, with an unmistakable finality to it. “He don’t anymore.”

—

And it goes like this for months — her watching Arthur, and Abigail watching her. She is sure at first it’s just idle jealousy, but the longer it goes on, the longer she watches how Abigail speaks to Arthur, too, the less sure she becomes. Maybe Abigail’s eyes are just like that; maybe she’s got a hardness to her that Mary-Beth can’t come to appreciate yet. 

(It’s in Grimshaw too, more obvious; but it ain’t directed at anyone in specific, for Grimshaw. She thinks. She wonders.)

Arthur ain’t stupid, though — he knows when it is he’s being watched. He glances up from where she stares at him drawing in that journal of his and he shuts it slowly, cautiously, before giving her a nod and a smile. She could live for weeks off that nod and a smile — like a snake slowly drawing food from a mouse. 

He comes back from an awful robbery one time — half the law chasing them, Hosea said — with a gold-and-pearl necklace in his hands. Other things, too — cash, jewels, lockets — but that one he keeps tucked between his fingers after the camp gets its share.

She doesn’t dare to hope, even after he walks up to her and holds it out on his palm. She just stares up at him like a foolish doe.

“Though you’d earned something nice,” he mumbles. “What with all the good work you been doin’ for us lately.”

Her fingers close around the pearls; her breath catches.

“It’s lovely, Arthur,” she says. 

He smiles. He nods. She feasts.

—

Jack’s big enough to crawl around now; sometimes Mary-Beth finds him scurrying underfoot while Abigail’s just staring off at nothing, way out on the horizon line. 

“Mind your son,” she snaps at her once, and Abigail gives her a look that she expects so fully to be that bitter anger; and it’s just emptiness. An open chasm. 

“I’ll do that,” Abigail says to her, hollow, and later that night Mary-Beth cries and doesn’t know why. 

—

“I need to talk to you,” Abigail tells her.

That’s it — just those words in passing during the day’s chores. No time nor place, but Mary-Beth knows what she means; alone. Later. After the rest of them have all gone to bed, or out drinking. 

Mary-Beth lets the bitter anger and dread build in her throughout the day. She does nothing to press it down; if anything she nurtures it, lets the poison grow in her stomach until she’s ready to give Abigail as much vitriol as she gets. What makes _you_ the only woman round here allowed to have desires — your man didn’t even want to stick around for you and your child — don’t you think that way you look at Arthur’s part of why — 

Abigail brings her coffee by the campfire. Mary-Beth lets the heat of it melt into her hands. 

The bitterness wanes; her courage is being eaten up by watching Abigail there, hair a mess and fingers all curled around a coffee mug. How old is she, in any case? Mary-Beth had thought she was twenty-four, maybe, but she looks younger than that here now. 

“Dutch had a woman,” Abigail begins slowly, and it’s so outside what Mary-Beth was thinking was gonna come that she thinks for a moment she misheard. But Abigail presses on — “Well. He had two women. First was Susan. By the time he found John she was already getting old for him — old and independent, and he ain’t never liked that. So he starts asking her to work things around the camp, take care of the younger girls — and he finds Annabelle.”

Mary-Beth has heard the name only in passing; usually in the same sentence as _Colm O’Driscoll_ , and a broken quality to the words. Even she had known a little better than to ask. 

“You should hear the way the boys talk about her,” Abigail says softly. “She was a unique woman, that was for sure. I think she gave Dutch as good as she got. I think maybe he — I don’t know. I think he did love her. Much as he really loves anyone.”

Neither of them have the courage to put Arthur’s name in their mouths then, but Mary-Beth can see it in Abigail’s the same as she can taste it in hers. 

“Colm knew it, and he took her,” Abigail says. “Whatever it was, it weren’t pretty. They don’t talk about it, the men.”

Abigail sets her mug on the ground. Mary-Beth startles to realize hers has grown cold; she sips it anyway, tasting the bitterness of it. 

“You understand I was brought on as their whore?” Abigail says suddenly. Mary-Beth nods; she’s heard as many jokes from Bill to know, even if it ain’t Abigail’s profession nowadays. “Right. I was around your age, however old you’re pretending to be. Me being young like that, that pleased most of them, you understand? Made them feel young too. John was the only one around the same age as I was — only one stupid enough to get me knocked up, too. And he — well. Here I am, a whore with a baby and no father to speak of, and all the care and comfort a wretch like me could ever hope for. Why would I ever want to leave this gang, with prospects like that?”

Mary-Beth feels her head swimming. She wonders briefly if Abigail put whiskey in the coffee; she knows she didn’t, though. Something deeper and worse is soaking its way into her bones. 

“ _Listen to me,_ Mary-Beth Gaskill,” Abigail says, with a ferocity so intense that Mary-Beth looks up to meet her eyes. There’s that ice; a sluice in her blood. “Those are your options here, if you think you’re going to go falling in love with the men who head up this place. Do you hear me? You could be working girls like yourself in thirty years, you could be tied here with a baby and no place to go, or you could be a bargaining chip for this fool war of theirs. You want any of that?” 

_If it’s him_ , Mary-Beth nearly says. _If it’s him I’ll be anything._

“I don’t know,” she rasps instead. 

Abigail stares at the sky like she’s searching for something. 

“Keep your own money,” she says finally. “That’s all I ask of you. Alright? However you gotta do it, find a way to keep your own.”

Mary-Beth sits staring into the fire as Abigail takes the coffee mug from her hands.

“Goodnight,” Abigail says, and she retreats back to where her baby’s sleeping, curled up on furs and stolen horse blankets.

—

John’s return is the first time she feels afraid inside that camp. 

The shouting is something tremendous; a voice she doesn’t recognize ricocheting through the camp until she realizes it’s _Arthur_ , Arthur in a rage, Arthur with real force behind him, and she knows all of a sudden why he’s the one sent out to collect because she wants to empty her pockets, her mind, her chest if he’d just stop sounding like that. 

Abigail is shouting too, at Arthur or John or both of them or none of them, and Jack’s crying high and thin, and it don’t stop until Arthur hits John so hard his nose shatters and then Dutch is peeling them apart, and Mary-Beth has her hands around her knees and her heart rabbit-fast in her chest and someone else is crying and she realizes it’s her.

She doesn’t catch Arthur writing in his journal for weeks after that. 

—

And then: Blackwater.

And then: Running.

And then: Always running, they’re always running, with a dozen people in tow and a dozen more in the ground behind them. 

The journey up the mountain is bitter cold and awash with fear and nobody wants to talk much, but in the spring melt of New Hanover she catches scraps and pieces of what it was that happened. It was a set-up or maybe it wasn’t; it went bad or maybe they made it bad; it wasn’t right; there was a woman.

There was a woman — she knows that much. She hears her name out of Javier’s lips while she’s offering a foolish scrap of kindness to the O’Driscoll boy who looks more like a frightened deer than a hardened criminal. 

Heidi McCourt. Dutch shot her; he had to; he didn’t have to. Micah told him to; Micah just called out for safety. It was necessary; it was sinful. It was bad. It was bad. However it happened, it was bad. 

John bolts awake one night, from where he’s curled up at Abigail’s side one of the nights she lets him sleep there — Mary-Beth, pretending to sleep, hears him say her name and the word _pulp_ and she doesn’t want to hear any more. 

—

The horror of it doesn’t last forever — it never does. Getting Micah back is inevitable; getting Sean back is a blessing. The camp has a reverie like they haven’t had since before the thing in Blackwater, and Arthur _laughs_ — she actually sees him laugh. 

She realizes, seeing it, that he could’ve been laughing all this time; she hasn’t been watching him. 

When he walks by as she’s staring at Molly and Dutch and wondering _Susan or Abigail or Annabelle_ , she feels some old kind of spark try to catch in her chest.

“Arthur,” she says, because she is not sixteen and she has seen those eyes now narrowed in hatred. “Arthur, would you dance with me?”

He coughs. He shuffles around on his feet, that confused thing he does. Finally, he nods. 

They dance, and all the steps are right; all the hands are in all the right spots. But it feels empty, like that look she found in Abigail’s eyes that once and never saw again. 

When he bows, she says thank you; when he walks away, she watches. 

And then she turns to the little fire outside camp, where Kieran’s brushing a knot out of a horse’s mane, and she watches him with hands folded across her lap. 

—

Sean and Arthur take her out robbing. The stage coach driver puts his knife to her throat, shouting at Arthur to put the weapons down — he lifts his rifle to his eye like it’s nothing to him and misses her head by an inch. 

When the blood splashes across her face and into the inside of her lips, it just tastes like blood. 

—

These are the three options: Susan or Abigail or Annabelle.

Mary-Beth, in the quiet dark of a night long after everyone else has gone to bed, finds that there is a fourth. 

She peels pearls off a gold chain necklace one by one.

She could be, after all of this is over, Heidi McCourt. 

She could be a young woman, a pretty woman, a newspaper headline. She could be a botched robbery left bleeding in the street to die. She could be the subject of John Marston’s nightmares. 

She could be shot in the head in pursuit of glory, and nobody can even agree upon why. 

With needle and thread, she sews the pearls into the inside lining of her dress. 

And then she sleeps, her chest warm, her fingers full of ice. 

**Author's Note:**

> Brief note on tags:
> 
>  _Underage prostitution:_ Abigail's canon backstory  
>  _Underage sex:_ Mary-Beth lies to the gang about how old she is and claims to be 18 when she's 16; she has a crush on Arthur, who never appears to reciprocate, but she daydreams/has fantasies about him. 
> 
> Title from Dickinson's ["My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52737/my-life-had-stood-a-loaded-gun-764)


End file.
